


Spin-Drift

by Senri



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-22
Updated: 2011-10-22
Packaged: 2017-10-24 20:42:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/267679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senri/pseuds/Senri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mostly-unrelated Kingdom Hearts shorts.  1: Three things that Ienzo passed on to Zexion.  2: The wiles of memory between times and identities and worlds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Spin-Drift

1\. Breakfast, those memories, waking up from a long night and coming into the morning. Ienzo had no appetite but he was provided with heavy food. Fluffy scrambled eggs, toast and jam, orange juice and milk over granola, suitable for a young boy expected to grow.

He still wasn't speaking, through those breakfasts. Ienzo by then had perfected the art of isolating himself with one agile twist of his mind. He could be alone in a crowd of people, on the edge of all of them, watching.

Just, what he remembers: a bed too big for him, where he knocked around like a dried pea in a tin. Stretching his feet out under the smooth sheets, the comforter and fabric sliding against his skin, undemanding.

(Zexion rarely sleeps, although he maintains a penchant for food. There's nothing quite like that feeling of safe harbor to put someone else at ease, which he's called upon to do, now and again. He remembers someone comforting him, and he improves on that.

No one listens like him. He really understands. He's been through it all, after all).

2\. Shooting marbles, with the other children, between being chased by them. Even kept him close, tied to the apron strings so to speak, for the most part, but Ienzo was already becoming slippery, with an exploratory bent. An observer, he was hungry to observe: but not even a level stare could always protect him from the bigger children. Sometimes, he just had to cut and run.

But sometimes, he'd smirch his pressed pants with courtyard dust, crouching down on the cobblestones with other older boys and a few girls jostling at his elbows, fighting for marbles.

He picked up a lost one for his first, and went on winning more with that. It was all angles, calculation, with just a bare element of gamble, and social status as well as the marble to lose. He hated that moment of having to let fly, but Ienzo clambered to the top of the heap, the diminutive marble king.

He could win when it came to thinking, at least. He was the master of the calculated gamble.

(Zexion later would remember that, and his favorite, the clear cat's eye with a twist of green running through the glass - people not anything more or less than that, some more appealing than others, to be collected, calculated, used, and put away for later.)

3\. Sitting with Even, eating sea salt ice cream, both of them leaning forward with their elbows on their knees and nearly being equal, like that. Even then Ienzo hungered for independence and control and he liked that, those moments, when Even would shuffle his ubiquitous stacks of papers aside and they'd go sit on the lab stairs in the tawny afternoon sun, both of them licking trickling ice cream off the sides of their hands.

Until he can say everything he wants to say perfectly, Ienzo would rather not say anything at all.

His eyes are nothing more than camera lenses. His brain is complicated biological apparatus to turn a reel of film, committing all of this to the deepest memory he can. This man who's in charge of him, these boundaries that delineate his world.

(Zexion can be loquacious, an orator when it's required of him. A schemer must scheme smoothly. A manipulator must wind people round his fingers.

He'd rather take than give, and what he takes most people throw away, unthinking, more fool they. They were all fools. He remembers).


	2. Garden Party

She finds him in the gardens, reading. Kairi is very small, and all the plants climb up over her head, so even the well-kept palace grounds rustle with a little mystery. She can duck and disappear into mulch and secret shadow and dampness, burying dirt under her nails and playing pretend.

Ienzo is not much bigger than she is, but he's studied much longer, and for being a bit of a prim boy he knows a lot about the plants and the place, and he does fit there, loamy blue-shadowed eyes and that dusky hair. He never speaks, Kairi just talks to him. A palace servant tells her his name.

He does teach her things. He shows her how you can pull off the trumpet-petal of a columbine to drink the nectar, like a small bird, just a spot of sweetness on their larger tongues.

Ω

"You can drink flower honey," she tells her boys, much later, when she's older. She doesn't remember how she first learned but she remembers the learning, drinking like a fairy from a columbine-flower.

Destiny Island doesn't do it right. Sora and Riku find her magnificent flowers, sundew in sprays and tropically bright trumpets, but they're not what she remembers. The three of them are allowed to wander freely together while they search. The Islands are wild, but tame. Uncoiffed, but not dangerous.

Kairi sometimes thinks about finding strangers there, and she's always a little disappointed that they never turn a corner and come across someone small and silent, browsing a book under the dappled shade.

"Even if you can't drink from flowers, we can all share this," Sora grins, sunny, holding up a fruit shaped like a star. "It's a Paopu! A promise fruit."

She eats one later, all for herself. It's sticky and messy, joyfully sweet on her tongue.

Ω

And Zexion, he finds the girl on a trip to Wonderland, made idly, simply to catch up on things. He's a master of illusion, suited to traverse a place where illusions become reality; he can even be appropriately nonsensical, and a rhymester, when he's called upon to be.

The March Hare has rolling reddened eyes, the same as the Hatter, and whenever Zexion stops here for tea he presses the steaming cup against fastidiously closed lips.

"We have a new g-g-guest, today, Illusionist, sir," the Hare stutters to him, and Zexion nods and inclines his head to the pallid girl they present him with, slick blond hair and deep blank blue eyes, that glance shyly towards him and then down. He'd press a kiss to her be-gloved hand if he didn't half think it would shrivel her up like a dried flower, and he watches her watch him, through cobwebby lashes.

"Good day," she says, and he says, "Good day to you." There is something quite familiar about the way she carries herself, although it's turned about, spelled wrong. He didn't become so very very different from Ienzo, he thinks he recalls.

"What shall you do with her?" he asks their hosts.

"She ought to go to school," says the Hatter firmly.

"She ought to have a f-f-family," says the Hare, decisive.

"She's a bit like you, isn't she?" The both of them between them are sometimes more perceptive than he likes, not to mention the Doormouse, gratefully asleep. It's a lucky kind of perception, this time, because she's given over to him to take with no trouble at all.

He picks her a daisy for her to occupy herself with, and holds her hand so she doesn't trail off too much, and watches her turn the limp, plain little flower curiously over in her free hand.

It's not quite the right thing, is it? But the future does twist from what the past once was. And it matches her well enough, that white and yellow pallor, the way it droops as he walks her into the dusk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the 31-days prompt "without sense of time lost."

**Author's Note:**

> For the 31-days prompt "walk in empty places."


End file.
